We report an upper bound on the strain amplitude of gravitational wave bursts in a waveband from around 800 Hz to 1.25 kHz. In an effective coincident observing period of 62 hours, the prototype laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors of the University of Glasgow and Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, have set a limit of 4.9 × 10-16, averaging over wave polarizations and incident directions. This is roughly a factor of 2 worse than the theoretical best limit that the detectors could have set, the excess being due to unmodelled non-Gaussian noise. The experiment has demonstrated the viability of the kind of observations planned for the large-scale interferometers that should be on-line in a few years time.

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Wales College of Cardiff, Cardiff, UK
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany